She has six months to draw a disputed border true. The man sent to guard her has already stood on her worst mistake.
A royal surveyor must map a disputed border before treaty talks, escorted by a former captain who once stood on her worst mistake.
Completed · 18 chapters · 3h 8m
WarmSensual tension; intimacy fades to black.Yearning · Dark & dangerous
Violence, Violence against civilians (past), Grief, Death of a parent, Near-drowning, Injury
No ratings yet
Dear Maeve,
Orla Tallis is the youngest master surveyor the Ostmere guild has admitted in thirty years, and she has built her name on not repeating her mistakes. She carries the two she has made rolled in the bottom of her dead father's instrument case: a ford drawn eleven miles out of place, a ridge two hundred feet too high. Now the Crown has sent her into the Ashfall, the upland two crowns have argued over for sixty years, to survey it true before the treaty talks at Stannock. Six months on foot, the Brack valley last, for reasons of season. And an escort she did not ask for. Corin Stroud is a former garrison captain, cheap and quiet, his name written into the Chancellery's warrant in a different ink. He has repacked her mule before she reaches the gate. He picks every route and gives her the reasons after. He never says safe; he says fine, which is worse. And on the first morning he tells her he has used her first map. He was on it. Across a ferry whose ferryman knows a soldier by how he stands a mule, up a rotten watchtower in the wind, through three days of rain in an empty steading, Orla learns to read a track and Corin learns to read a contour, and they begin to walk in step. She has never asked for anything she could not first measure. He has arranged his whole life so that nothing he cares for is near enough to be hurt. And the Chancellery asked for him by name, and he has not said why. The Brack is at the end of the road, and whatever she draws there, both crowns will read.
No ratings yet. Be the first to rate this story.
This spring the Crown sent me to draw the Ashfall, six months on foot, with an escort I did not ask for. When I came under the eastern gate he had already repacked my mule. Everything was in a different place, and everything was in a better one. He had moved my father’s case to the inside, against the ribs, and when I told him not to touch it he said he already had.
He gave me his terms on the road. If he says down, I go down, and I may ask why afterwards. I told him those weren’t terms, they were a list. He said he had never been offered terms before and was doing his best with it.
He says fine the way other people say nothing. He picks every route and gives me the reasons later. At the ferry an old man looked once at his hands and knew more about him than I do.
Last week I climbed a tower with fifty-two treads, eleven of them gone, and at the top I asked him to stand behind me so the wind could not move the glass. He asked where I wanted his hands. I told him. The reading held.
Afterwards I counted my paces to the next fixed point, and lost count at forty, and did not begin again.
From The Cartographer and the Blade
Read this if you want a long road and two people learning to walk in step.
Read this if you want the wait to be six months of road.
Read this if you want a road instead of a court, and no magic at all.
Slow burns where the waiting is the point
Completed stories you can finish tonight